Push for a Community Garden Gets Uprooted

The likelihood that Village residents will have a garden to share this planting season is growing dim after neighbors to the most viable site convinced community leaders to look elsewhere.

A community garden was identified last year as one of the easiest and most popular ways to make Montgomery Village more attractive. After months of evaluating potential locations, the Montgomery Village Foundation deemed the open parcel next to William Hurley Park in North Village as the best place for the garden: the ground is fairly flat, it has good access for would-be users and easy access to a steady water supply.

But in the weeks since, residents in adjacent neighborhoods of Highland Hall and Pleasant Ridge mobilized against the proposal, saying that the parcel is too visible and that the garden will become an unkempt eyesore.

Backed by the unanimous support of the North Village Homes Corp.’s board of directors and armed with the lopsided results of a neighborhood survey, more than a dozen of those neighbors made their case Thursday night to the Montgomery Village Foundation’s board of directors.

Nineteen of the 21 surveys were sharply against the idea, explained Jim Andary, vice president of the North Village board, as he read a sampling of typical responses. One resident was “nothing less than stunned, disturbed and utterly dismayed,” he read, while another “never would have bought in the neighborhood” if the garden had been there in the first place.

A few supporters tried to argue that the latest generation of community gardens—for example, in Germantown and Rockville—are avoiding the pitfalls that plagued community gardens in earlier eras.

In the two years that Center Stage resident Sariah Toze has been paying for plots at Woottons Mill Park, demand has skyrocketed, she said, yet the garden stays well-maintained by policing itself to keep users from letting their plots fall into disrepair.

With more and more communities planting gardens, Toze worries that Montgomery Village is getting left behind.

“All my friends in my stage of life—married, a few young kids—they all want garden plots,” she said. “… You really do create a sense of community as you grow a garden.”

But for Highland Halls resident Donald Evans, any gains in neighborhood camaraderie would be far outweighed by the apparent “duplicity” of Montgomery Village adhering so tightly to so many aesthetic standards, while at the same time inviting the problems of a community garden.

“We bought into a community understanding its restrictions. We bought into it because of how it looked,” Evans said. “I’d just love the board to hold to those principles and find some place less obtrusive.”

The testimonies quickly convinced the board to rule out Hurley Park and focus on two sites in East Village: in Pepco’s right-of-way next to Patsy Huson Ball Field on Fulks Farm Road, and on more than three acres next to Community Services for Autistic Adults and Children, which CSAAC had previously committed to ceding over to the Montgomery Village Foundation.

Several other sites have already failed the foundation’s litmus test—either because of exorbitant costs or because property owners declined—and the Pepco and CSAAC sites have tall hurdles to clear before any seed is planted in their soil.

“It’s a real problem in terms of finding a location,” Dave Humpton, the foundation’s executive vice president, said after the board nixed the North Village site.

Pepco has been cold to the idea, members of East Village’s board have already told the foundation that they oppose that location, and quickly settling the terms for the CSAAC site will be difficult, Humpton said.

The transfer of the three-plus-acre plot has been in the works for years, and sticking points remain in terms of access and parking. But establishing the site as a community garden has immediate and obvious appeal, said Ian Paregol, CSAAC Inc.'s executive director.

"The idea of partnering with MVF to develop the open space adjacent to CSAAC into a community garden offers an array of win-win opportunities for both organizations," he said. "Participants in CSAAC's program would welcome the opportunity to help tend to the gardens and operate a micro-business tasked with selling the produce. That would make for a tremendous, inclusive opportunity."